Sometimes, our pain calls for something other than straightforward prose. Poems can offer new ways to understand our experiences—especially those that are confusing, distressing, or just hard to put our finger on. For poets like Natasha Trethewey, poetry is an “act of remembering”; she used it to process memories of her mother’s death and her stepfather’s abuse. For Carolyn Forché, it’s a means of witness, a way to mark injustice and convey its urgency to the world. And for Tracy K. Smith, poetry is a way to grapple with the long history of violence against Black Americans—it can even resurrect those erased from the record, if only on the page.
I see humor and beauty in many things, especially people. I’m a natural people person. I often say that I try to make extraordinary pictures out of ordinary, everyday people. I practice on my friends and associates almost all the time. Luckily for me I have access to plenty of people who don’t mind being photographed. Without them I wouldn’t be as happy as I am.
Writing, Schalansky theorizes, is not resurrection, “but it can enable everything to be experienced.” The best essays in Extinct manage this, bringing the ashtray and the tragedy of arsenic wallpaper and the strange floodlights of streets lit by moon towers not quite to life but into the realm of our imagined experience.
Jane Ridley, a professor of modern history at the University of Buckingham and the author of “George V: Never a Dull Moment,” a richly detailed and diverting new assessment of his life and reign, thinks that the “boring” label is unfair. She concedes that the king’s stiffness and cultivated sang-froid create barriers to understanding him. “The biographer,” she admits, “searches George’s writings in vain for an inner life.” But, Ridley continues, there was more going on beneath the gruff Saxe-Coburg exterior than met at first glance. Indeed, she calls him “one of the most successful monarchs in British history.”
Straight couples in denim and white Nikes
drink enough beer and then forget their keys.